STRUER, DENMARK, October 6, 2004 - Cisco Systems and NetDesign today announced a contract with leading hi-fi specialists Bang and Olufsen to migrate its worldwide customer support service and internal IT helpdesk to an Internet Protocol (IP) based contact centre at its head office in Struer. Bang and Olufsen will benefit from improved relationships with its customers and retailers globally by providing more responsive support services. The project was delivered in close collaboration with Cisco's channel partner, NetDesign, in Denmark, who provided systems integration expertise for the full IP Contact Centre deployment.

Lars Hardboe Galsgaard, General Manager, Corporate IT at Bang & Olufsen, said: "The relationship Bang & Olufsen has with its distribution channel is extremely important. Our resellers are increasingly demanding speed and a higher quality of call response. To meet these demands, the company decided to introduce a new contact centre in order to deliver an improved service to stores all over the world."

Bang & Olufsen's contact centre will be equipped with Cisco IP phones using Cisco's IP Contact Centre (IPCC) Express Edition call management system and Cisco Call Manager call-processing software. The solution will be integrated with Bang & Olufsen's customer relationship management system to allow the organisation to further streamline support services to its resellers.

Improvements to the speed and quality of call response were key objectives of the project, but equally crucial is Cisco IP Contact Centre's ability to deploy skill-based routing of calls to a relevant helpdesk agent. Bang & Olufsen will be able to add new locations and users quickly and easily and service availability will be maximised as a result of a fully-redundant, resilient network architecture. Important call centre statistics to monitor service levels, such as call activity and average call time, are automatically generated by the IPCC system.

Niels Christian Furu, General Manager, Cisco Denmark, said: "Cisco's IP Contact Centre provides a cost-effective solution to improving customer service for organisations like Bang & Olufsen. They require a contact centre which is flexible, easy to manage and can be reconfigured easily to adapt to changing requirements."

Morten Kolind, Sales Director, NetDesign Denmark, said: "Bang & Olufsen is known for producing high-quality products, including phones, so they set extremely high standards for quality and user-friendliness. I believe that through NetDesign's experience gained from many successful deployments of Cisco's market leading IP telephony solutions, we were able to match those standards."

About Cisco IP Communications

Cisco IP Communications is a comprehensive system of enterprise-class solutions including IP telephony, unified communications, rich media IP audio and videoconferencing, IP video broadcasting and customer contact solutions that take advantage of customers' existing Cisco IP infrastructure to deliver new converged applications. Since shipping its first IP phone in 2001, Cisco has in the past 12 months alone shipped over 450,000 IP phones in the European region. In Western Europe, according to IDC, Cisco ships 49% of all IP telephony products, which are a part of the enterprise telephony market. Cisco has over 14,500 IP Communications customers globally and has sold over 3 million phones worldwide. More information about Cisco IP Communications is available at:http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/innovators/VoIP/index.html